Payment of airline tickets: consumers advocate termination of prepayment

In the crown crisis, customers sometimes have to wait months for their tickets to be refunded. Consumer advice centers find this shameful and outrageous. They demand: The old prepaid practice should be eliminated and new rules introduced.

In view of the delays in reimbursing the costs of canceled flights in the Corona crisis, the German Consumer Association (vzbv) is calling for the previous prepayment regulations to be repealed. In the future, the ticket should only be paid a few days before departure, demanded the head of vzbv, Klaus Müller, in the “Rheinische Post”. This requires new legislation.

It could not be that airline customers had to wait months for several hundred euros and it was not entirely clear “when they will see the money again,” Müller criticized. This approach to business is shameful and outrageous, especially as it is supported by billions of dollars in taxpayer aid.

80,000 complaints

According to Müller, consumer advice centers have already counted twenty times the number of complaints about flight and travel companies compared to normal years. In absolute numbers, this was more than 80,000 cases. “This is largely due to the annoyance over refunds of advance payments that were not made or came too late after the outbreak of the corona pandemic,” explained the head of vzbv.

His association asked various travel agencies, tour operators and airlines to stop, Müller said. Among the companies that vzbv finally had to sue were renowned suppliers such as TUI, Easyjet and Condor.